作者｜The Rust Survey Team
The translator | nuclear Coke
Editor| Yanshan
It's spring again, and the latest Rust Language Status Survey report has arrived. A few days ago, the Rust Language Official Blog released the 2021 Rust Language Status Survey Report, this round of surveys was launched in December 2021, a total of 9354 respondents from 113 different countries and regions around the world received feedback, the report is based on these feedback, after statistical analysis, the following analysis results.
Global community
In 2021, the Rust community continues to grow. The survey also received a record number of complete responses, with 9,354 respondents, about 1,500 more than the previous year's total.
90% of respondents said they would use Rust in all their needs, 5% mentioned that they had used Rust but no longer use it, and 4% said they had never used Rust.
The survey was available in 10 languages, with 78% of the questionnaires filled out in English, followed by Chinese Simplified (6%), German (4%) and French (3%). Although the majority of respondents chose the English version of the questionnaire, it covered a wide area around the world and attracted developers from 113 different countries and regions. The United States had the highest share, at 24 percent, followed by Germany (12 percent), China (7 percent) and the United Kingdom (6 percent).
But English is not the preferred language for all Rustaceans. Nearly 7 percent of respondents said they were reluctant to communicate technically in English, and another 23 percent said that English was fine but better in other languages. In addition to English, the rustaceans' most common preferred languages are ranked by place of residence Chinese Simplified, German, and French. The group of developers who do not like to communicate technically in English is divided by language from Japanese, Chinese Simplified and Russian.
Rust usage
Rust's user percentage is still on the rise. Of those who use Rust, 81 percent use it at least once a week, up from 72 percent in last year's survey.
75% of users mentioned that they would use Rust to write production-ready code, but 27% of respondents said it was difficult to do so.
Overall, Rustaceans seems to enjoy programming with Rust, with only 1% of respondents finding Rust not interesting to use. In addition, about a quarter of respondents believe that Rust lacks a real advantage over other programming languages.
Rust's professional application performance
Rust is now seen as a powerful language that can be safely applied in professional environments. Of the respondents who used Rust, 59 percent occasionally used Rust in their actual work, and 23 percent used Rust for most of their coding. Last year, by contrast, only 42 percent of respondents actually used Rust at work.
For many Rustaceans, using Rust at work is a long, but worth fighting for. First, 83 percent of respondents who actually applied Rust acknowledged that it was "challenging"; it wasn't clear whether the challenge came from Rust's features or simply because of the introduction of a new programming language. The good news is that only 13 percent of respondents believe that the Rust language slows down their team's development in practice, while 82 percent say Rust helps their team achieve their development goals.
The cost of using the Rust language is also satisfactory: only 1% of respondents consider rust to be redundant, and 79% think it is worth the money. When asked if development teams would use Rust again in the future, 90 percent of respondents gave a positive answer. Finally, 89 percent of respondents who use Rust at work said their development teams have experienced the joy of programming with Rust.
As for the reasons respondents use Rust at work, the answer was that Rust helps users "build relatively correct, bug-free software," which respondents gave 96% support. In addition to correctness, performance (92%) became another important reason to choose Rust. Another 89% of respondents said they chose Rust primarily for its critically acclaimed security attributes.
As you can see, Rust is basically ready for production challenges. Only 3% of respondents consider using Rust in production to be a "risky" behavior.
Realistic challenges
Overall, the annual survey shows that the Rustaceans community is still growing healthily, but it also reveals a number of problems that need to be solved. Rust's next top improvement focus is compilation time, with 61% of respondents saying the issue had to be addressed early. But the compiler team's efforts have not been in vain, and 61% of respondents said that Rust's compilation performance has improved significantly this year. Other areas for improvement are disk space (45%), debugging capabilities (40%), and GUI development (56%).
With the continued introduction and improvement of tools (e.g., rust-analyzer, IntelliJ Rust, etc.), the IDE experience became the most improved project for the Rust language this year, and was recognized by 56% of respondents.
But the highest rated compiler error message, which was praised by 90% of respondents for its excellent actual performance. When asked what concerns they had about rust's future, respondents' number one answer was concern about underuse in the industry (38%). But as things stand, rust adoption in work scenarios is steadily moving forward, and the community seems to have found the right direction to solve this problem.
The next concern is the fear that the Rust language will become overly complex (33%). But on the contrary, a small number of respondents also called for more additional functionality in the language (especially those that have not yet entered the pipeline).
Finally, the third biggest concern is rust practitioners' fear of a lack of strong support for the healthy development of language and community (30%). But with the establishment of the Rust Foundation and the gradual formation of the support structure, this problem should be solved. But much more concrete work remains to be done, and we need to work together.
The future can be expected
2021 is arguably the most important year since Rust was born. During the year, the Rust Foundation was officially established, the technical community grew larger than ever, and the Rust language continued to move at a solid pace toward the future.
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/15/Rust-Survey-2021.html